GHOST GIRL

Amid the grab bag of discursive forms that make up Gerstler's eighth collection, single anecdotes animate several poems, as when a speaker misreads an offer for "Beethoven's Complete Symphonies" as "Beethoven's Complete Sympathies" and indulges in the not-so-surprising riff: "This immortal/ master... has not forgotten those left behind/ to endure gridlock and mind-ache,/ wearily crosshatching the earth's surface/ with our miseries...." Gerstler has a bit of a Billy Collins problem, writing poems that tussle with, but never quite extend, intentionally light premises that conceal serious subjects: domestic life, evolution and chronic stagnation, magic and the supernatural. In "Touring the Doll Hospital," for instance, the speaker asks, "Why so many senseless injuries?" and a few lines later, sighs, "Small soldiers with no Geneva Convention to protect them...." Such jokes tend to sink pieces in which some version of the spirit world is invoked: "Witch Songs" refers to an "invitation/ written in semen and ash—/ can't we just reply in ink?" while, "The Oracle at Delphi, Reincarnated as a Contemporary Adolescent Girl," begins, "I'm high most of the time on hallucinogenic fumes." Often, one doubts the poet's own investment in particular poems. What to make of a long catalogue, "Fuck You Poem #45," which reads like an undergraduate exercise: "Fuck you in slang and conventional English./ Fuck you in lost and neglected lingoes./ Fuck you hungry and sated; faded, pock marked and defaced./ Fuck you with orange rind, fennel and anchovy paste." While the collection's formal heterogeneity is refreshing, too many of the pieces here feel tossed off. (Apr.)